Corruption and Abuse of Power in Putin’s Russia

The New York Timescontinuing its impressively tough recent line of critical reporting on the Putin KGB state, reports:

Only one spectator showed up for the final hearing in the killing of Magomed Yevloyev. He was a broad-beamed, ruddy-faced man in a carefully pressed black suit, and once in the courtroom he removed his tall fur hat, set it on the bench beside him and waited for a chance to speak.

Sunlight streamed in the window, bouncing off the white walls, but the old man had brought a heaviness with him into the room. When the time came, Yakhya Yevloyev stood and recited a litany of evidence not gathered — witnesses not interviewed, threads left dangling — that might have led to a murder conviction in his son’s death.

The room went silent out of respect for the man’s loss, and for a moment it seemed as if the process could rewind 18 months to the beginning, when his son, an opposition leader in the southern republic of Ingushetia, was hustled into a police car and shot through the head at point-blank range.

Back then, in August 2008, it was a crime so outrageous that it seemed to demand action. Magomed Yevloyev was openly feuding with the region’s leader, Murat M. Zyazikov, when the two men happened to board the same flight from Moscow. Barely half an hour after the police escorted Mr. Yevloyev, 36, off the plane, he was dropped off at a hospital with an execution-style wound.

Death is often murky in the violent borderland of the Russian north Caucasus, but this one seemed different. Protests broke out in Ingushetia, and Western leaders pressed Moscow to punish those responsible. Even the Kremlin appeared to feel the political pressure: within two months, President Dmitri A. Medvedev removed both Mr. Zyazikov and his interior minister.

Almost two years later, the case serves as a lesson in how the legal process can be strangled. In Russia, the prosecutor has long served as the guard dog of the powerful. Peter the Great envisioned the office as “the czar’s eye,” and Stalin forged it into a brutal instrument of control.

Though post-Soviet reforms pared away that power, prosecutors still come under direct political pressure and rarely turn their scrutiny upward. In this case, federal investigators reporting to Moscow took over and blocked any inquiry that could have pointed to senior officials.

Yakhya urged investigators to pursue the case as a murder, but an examination of the legal records shows that possibility was not explored. Instead, the state opened a case of negligent homicide, a mild charge used in medical malpractice cases, and prosecutors requested a sentence of two years. By comparison, defendants can receive five-year sentences for distributing pirated software.

The official explanation of what happened took shape an hour and five minutes after Magomed Yevloyev died on a hospital bed. His death, investigators wrote, resulted from a bizarre accident.

‘Point Blank’

When Magomed Yevloyev arrived at the hospital that day, he was in a so-called deep coma — unresponsive to touch, sound or light — and a doctor measured his blood pressure at zero. A coroner pronounced him dead at 2:55 p.m., describing the gunshot wound to his head, canting slightly upward through his right parietal lobe, as “point blank.”

At 4 p.m., an investigator in the regional prosecutor’s office opened a negligent homicide case, stating that Mr. Yevloyev was being transported for questioning in a bombing case when he tried to wrestle a Kalashnikov rifle from the officer to his right. The investigator had not spoken to the three officers who were in the car — he had just read statements provided by the Ingush Interior Ministry — and his explanation raised more questions than it answered.

“Measures were taken to suppress that attempt,” he wrote, “during the course of which Mr. Yevloyev received a gunshot wound from an accidental shot from a police weapon.”

This story was fleshed out over the next two weeks, but there were problems with it. The suspect, Ibragim D. Yevloyev (he shared a common surname with the victim, but they were not relatives), was not an officer who would normally transport a witness, but a guard for Ingushetia’s interior minister, who was at the airport to greet the president. And beginning with his first interview, at 4:25 p.m. that day, he was at a loss to explain how the accident had happened.

At a crime-scene re-enactment 13 days later, the suspect told forensic experts from the prosecutor’s office that he had not pulled the trigger. He said he had been aiming a 9-millimeter Stechkin pistol out of a window to his left, anticipating an attack by armed supporters of Magomed Yevloyev. When he wheeled around toward the two men grappling over the Kalashnikov, he said, Mr. Yevloyev reared back and hit the Stechkin, causing it to fire.

If investigators checked for Mr. Yevloyev’s fingerprints on the Kalashnikov, they never presented any evidence of it. And if Mr. Yevloyev reared his head back and hit the gun, it is not clear how the bullet hit him on the flat side of the head, an inch above his left ear. But a transcript of the crime-scene re-enactment shows the forensic experts did not press the matter:

Specialist Osenchugova: “Could your gun have possibly touched the head of the victim when you made that sudden turn?”

Ibragim Yevloyev: “The gun shot when I turned because of the fight. I can’t show exactly how it happened, it happened very quickly.”

“Later,” the transcript reads, “the suspect was asked to show with a laser pointer the trajectory of the gunshot. The suspect refused to do it, saying that for him the difference between a laser pointer and a real gun was fundamental.”

At that point, the prosecution experts took the laser and re-enacted the gunshot themselves. The investigator asked if anyone had questions, but no one did. Asked whether the officer’s account was plausible, Specialist Osenchugova said she considered it “possible not to rule out this mechanism of injury.”

And with that, the re-enactment was over.

A Political Enemy

Yakhya Yevloyev, 67, did not expect prosecutors to represent his interests. Under Russian law, victims hire their own counsel to cross-examine witnesses and testify in court. This gives them a formal voice, but not an equal one. In this case, Yakhya and his lawyers were alone in arguing that his son had been murdered.

There was no shortage of evidence that Magomed Yevloyev was viewed as a political enemy. After several years as a bare-knuckled assistant prosecutor — he left the job after he was accused of participating in a prisoner’s murder — Mr. Yevloyev founded the Web site Ingushetiya.ru, which criticized Mr. Zyazikov and rallied its readers to protest. After filing criminal cases against the site on extremism charges, prosecutors in June 2008 won a decision to close it. The site’s top editor applied for political asylum in France.

During the flight to Ingushetia from Moscow, Mr. Yevloyev and Mr. Zyazikov had found themselves in close quarters for the first time in years. A few weeks later, Mr. Zyazikov told a reporter from Ren TV, a Russian television channel, that he did not even know that Mr. Yevloyev was on the plane with him that day and had no idea who killed him. But Yakhya’s lawyers said their history raised the question of whether the men had a confrontation, and whether the president made the call that set the detention in motion.

Yakhya’s team also had a stroke of luck: a police investigator came forward to say he had been ordered to falsify testimony. Jambulat K. Shankhoyev had authorized police officers to bring Magomed in for questioning that day — but, Mr. Shankhoyev acknowledged, he later discovered that he had been asked to do so after Mr. Yevloyev was already in the police car. “I understood I had been set up,” the investigator wrote in a statement to Ingushetia’s president and prosecutor. When the investigator confronted his superiors about this, he wrote, he was told to keep quiet.

Nevertheless, investigators rejected motions filed by Yakhya’s lawyers one after another. They offered circular logic: If the preliminary investigation pointed to an accident, what legal basis was there for gathering evidence for a murder case?

So there would be no deposition of Mr. Zyazikov, or of passengers on the airplane who might have seen the two men interact, or of Mr. Shankhoyev, the investigator charging a cover-up. Police phone records would not be subpoenaed to trace the officers’ conversations with officials before and after the killing. Yakhya’s lawyers would not be allowed to be present during a crime scene re-enactment, leaving them powerless to point out its weaknesses.

Yuri N. Turygin, the regional prosecutor in Ingushetia, said he prayed Magomed Yevloyev would survive the gunshot wound, aware of the turmoil that would result if he died. Yet he suggested that Mr. Yevloyev, with his history of defiance, probably provoked his captors as he was being driven to police headquarters, knowing that some of his supporters were in pursuit.

“In my view, what caused his behavior was his character,” Mr. Turygin said in an interview. “He is a former prosecutor, he enjoyed some authority, and that dictated his behavior. It was probably within the framework of the law, but it was on the edge of an insult. He could humiliate a police officer — he could say, ‘They are running after you, and when they catch up with you, they will show you.’ ”

It was Mr. Turygin’s office that initially opened an investigation into negligent homicide. The case was taken out of his hands a day later, when it was transferred to the federal investigative committee, based in Moscow. In any case, Mr. Turygin said that if Yakhya Yevloyev had a compelling argument that a murder charge should have been pursued, the judges had leeway to send the case back to the prosecutor.

“The court did not consider it convincing and didn’t return the case,” Mr. Turygin said. “It’s the court’s assessment. I cannot criticize the judges’ actions.”

In response to detailed questions from The New York Times, a spokesman for the federal investigative committee wrote that legal analysis of the evidence was “not within the authority of investigative organs,” and suggested that questions be directed to judges.

Magomed S. Daurbekov, the chairman of Ingushetia’s Council of Judges, said the blame should fall on investigators, because judges were constrained by the evidence they compiled. He said the case should have been opened as a murder case and downgraded later if the evidence supported only a lesser charge, a procedure that might have reassured the victims that a full investigation had taken place. (In the United States, prosecutors usually bring the highest charges they believe the evidence will support, and judges, as in Russia, cannot revise them upward.)

In any case, Mr. Daurbekov said, it was out of the judges’ hands.

“It is not possible to say, ‘Why did the investigator do it this way?’ ” he said. “We cannot give our opinions on those matters. All we can say in this conversation is that it is on the conscience of those who investigated the case.”

A Final Hearing

In December 2009, Ibragim Yevloyev was convicted of negligent homicide and sentenced to two years in a prison colony. Yakhya appealed, and by March, when the case reached the Ingush Supreme Court in Magas, the capital, he was the last person hanging on the result. He stepped out into the hallway, nerves strung tight, when the three justices began deliberating.

He believed in the law. Conservative by nature, he had ordered his firebrand son to give up opposition activities. After his death, unnamed “friends of the deceased” publicly declared a blood feud against 13 officials, but Yakhya said he argued strenuously against it, rejecting a tradition that courses powerfully through the Caucasus. He repeated his answer like a prayer: Let the state punish them.

This was the last chance. In the brilliant light of the Supreme Court, he begged the judges to send the case back to the prosecutors on the basis of its flaws. Indeed the judges had identified a flaw, but it was not one that he expected. As he sat in stunned silence, the judges announced that prosecutors had overcharged Ibragim Yevloyev, and reduced his sentence from two years in a prison camp to two years’ house arrest.

So that was that. When one judge — an acquaintance from his hometown — crossed the room to touch Yakhya on the shoulder, he stalked wordlessly out onto the street and into a waiting car. His dignity seemed trampled.

“What happened here, I couldn’t have foreseen it,” he said later, when the words came. “It was a mockery, not only of me, but of all those who believed in the fulfillment of the law. It was a demonstration that the law can be bent.

“You can do whatever you want,” he said. “Steal, murder, kidnap. Whatever you want.”

The more radical voices in his son’s circle said Yakhya had been foolish to look to the courts for vindication in the first place. Magomed Khazbiyev, 30, one of the opposition leaders waiting at the airport on the day Magomed Yevloyev was killed, glinted with anger on the day of the decision.

“The judicial system in Ingushetia doesn’t exist now, and it never did,” Mr. Khazbiyev said. “Officially, yes, there is some judicial process. But the blood feud — whether or not there is Russian law, whether Russia exists, even if Russia disappears, or the whole outside world disappears — the blood feud in Ingushetia will exist until the last Ingush dies.”

There is no indication that Moscow wanted the case handled differently. Mr. Zyazikov — a retired lieutenant general in the Federal Security Service — works in Moscow now. When he was removed as Ingushetia’s president, he became an adviser to President Medvedev. (He refused, through a spokesman, to answer questions from The New York Times for this article.) His former interior minister has also had a soft landing, and is now working as a senior investigator for the Russian Interior Ministry. Through an intermediary, he also declined to comment.

The policeman, Ibragim Yevloyev, remains under house arrest, though his lawyer says he is still a target in a blood feud, and reluctant to step outside for fear of being shot.

But in the end, none of these men will make the final decision on how to define justice in this incendiary part of Russia. That choice arches into the future — someday falling to Magomed Yevloyev’s impish, dark-haired children, who will eventually have to decide whether to put their faith in the state.

They are still in elementary school, and do not see much of their father’s old allies from the opposition. Their mother hopes to protect them from the politics and violence that swallowed up her husband. As far as they know, their father died in a car accident.

54 responses to “Corruption and Abuse of Power in Putin’s Russia”

The Russian people are terribly abused it is true. However, no one will help them because they will not fight and die for their freedom.

Hong Kong puts 150,000 people up and demonstrating with their candles lit. The Russians put up only 150 total.

The Russians had their big chance when the Berlin wall came down. They did nothing.

The Bush crowd made a huge effort in Iraq and the purple fingers remained in the air while they died in the voting lines. Bushes effort in Iraq may pay off yet. The Iraq people are showing a lot of spirit. The Russians are showing none.

“The Bush crowd made a huge effort in Iraq and the purple fingers remained in the air while they died in the voting lines. Bushes effort in Iraq may pay off yet. The Iraq people are showing a lot of spirit. The Russians are showing none.”

Your comment is so hideous it borders on the insanely obscene.

The US has waged an almost endless war against Iraq since 1990.

I suggest you spare everyone here your utter hypocrisy and start recognizing the great crimes of the US.

As for freedom, I doubt anyone in Iraq feels free, given the country is now in a state of total wreck and ruin, with four million internal refugees and a million who have left the country.

Kuwait sent a plane with five tons of medical aid to Iraqis threatened by a humanitarian catastrophe. Aid organizations have warned Iraq was facing a humanitarian disaster amid widespread looting and anarchy.

Pope Benedict XVI has lamented that “nothing positive comes from Iraq”, in his Easter message in St Peter’s Square at the Vatican.

“Nothing positive comes from Iraq, torn apart by continual slaughter as the civil population flees,” he said.

LA RUSSOPHOBE RESPONDS:

Maybe the Russian invasion of Georgia could be used as a yardstick for failure. While the American action was supported across the globe, Russia was repudiated. While Russia failed to dislodged its hated foe, America did so.

Is this comment what you consider to be “objective” reporting? If so,you must be tripping out on acid or knee-deep in vodka.

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/07/15/putin-jab/
During a press conference today at the G8 summit in Russia, President Bush told President Vladimir Putin that Americans want Russia to develop a free press and free religion “like Iraq.” To laughter and applause, Putin responded: “We certainly would not want to have same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, quite honestly.” CNN’s Ed Henry called it a “tough jab.”

One of comments on the same webpage regarding GWB I mostly like:
“Will somone give him a BJ so we can impeach him already?”

He did not become a national hero. That was only a few factions which was noised around by the left wing media (those that are rapidly losing out to “fair and balanced”.

Iraq is a remarkable success that has surprised serious observers since muslims can almost never behave with restraint. Granted this story is not over and Iraq could degenerate into civil war. However, so far Iraq is doing well.

Guardianhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/09/bush-shoe-thrower-release-iraq
“… Martin Chulov meets the family of a man who who became a symbol of resistance to the US… Across Iraq and in every corner of the Arab world, Zaidi is being feted. The 20 words or so he spat at Bush – “This is your farewell kiss, you dog. This is for the widows and orphans of Iraq” – have been immortalised, and in many cases memorised… Pictures of the president ducking have been etched onto walls across Baghdad, made into T-shirts in Egypt, and appeared in children’s games in Turkey. Zaidi has won the adulation of millions, who believe his act of defiance did what their leaders had been too cowed to do. Iraq has been short of heroes since the dark days of Saddam Hussein, and many civilians are bestowing greatness on the figure that finally took the fight to an overlord…”

Zaidi acted like a total asshole, yet practically nothing happened to him (and certainly not from the Americans), despite his crybaby stories of “torture” in Iraqi prison. I’m still amazed how he was not rashed by the Security Service, making an even bigger scene for this melodrama. They acted professionally and basically ignored him, because he posed no real threat. Bush ducked and just laughed about it.

@”Iraq has been short of heroes since the dark days of Saddam Hussein.”

I’m wonder what it supposed to mean. Also, who ended “the dark days of Saddam Hussein”. I have no idea. Guess the “Iraqi heroes” did, then vanished.

Don’t forget, these are quotations from the western media. If you ask Iraqis, they will tell that the Saddam days were much better than the darkest days under yanks occupation, when hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed.

An average Kurd minority will tell you being gassed or shot in the genocide of Operation Anfal (over 4,000 villages and towns destroyed, almost 200,000 people murdered including also Christian Assyrians) was obviously so much better than the peace and prosperity of the Kurdish Autonomous Region.

An average Shia majority will surely tell you how cool it was under Saddam, when they were opressed in every possible way (from economic to political to religious) by the Sunni minority, when they served as an expendable cannon fodder in Saddam’s idiotic aggressions against the neighbouring countries (first against the fellow Shia of Iran, then against Kuwait & practically the whole world), and when their revolt was quite literally drowned in blood:

The Guardian newspaper is refusing to sack one of its staff reporters despite confirming that he is a member of one of Britain’s most extreme Islamist groups.

(…)

In 1994 Richard Gott, a veteran Guardian journalist, resigned as literary editor after he was unmasked as a former KGB spy. He admitted meeting the Russians and going on expenses-paid trips, but denied taking money.

But if seriously, such family names come from German baptism of jews: you will be Krauthammer (cabbage hammer), and you will be Rosenberg (rose mountain), and you will be Rosenbaum (rose tree). And you, moron will be Schweinficker! Sounds very similar to Bavarian or Austrian names, but one can distinguish.

But if seriously, such family names come from German baptism of jews: you will be Krauthammer (cabbage hammer), and you will be Rosenberg (rose mountain), and you will be Rosenbaum (rose tree). And you, moron, will be Schweinficker! Sounds very similar to Bavarian or Austrian names, but one can distinguish.

@Almost two years later, the case serves as a lesson in how the legal process can be strangled. In Russia, the prosecutor has long served as the guard dog of the powerful. Peter the Great envisioned the office as “the czar’s eye,” and Stalin forged it into a brutal instrument of control.

Regarding the Russian “investigations” into Caucasus murders, further adventures of the very symbol of the Russian military brutality, the Hero of Russia Budanov (last year and largely unreported, quitely swept under the carpet, and even most of the bodies still missing 10 years later):

Budanov not involved in disappearance of Chechens in 2000 – SKP

10.06.2009, 12.48

MOSCOW, June 10 (Itar-Tass) – The Investigations Committee of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office (SKP) has said there is no evidence to confirm the involvement of former Colonel Yuri Budanov in the disappearance of Chechen citizens in 2000.

“Budanov has been questioned twice, in the presence of his lawyer,” SKP spokesman Vladimir Markin said on Thursday.

“Budanov testified that he could not be present at the checkpoint, located near the Duba-Yurt settlement in the Shali District, during the periods when 18 Chechen residents disappeared without a trace. His testimony is confirmed by criminal case materials,” Markin said.

Due to this fact, investigators have cancelled the recognizance not to leave the place of residence (the measure of restraint selected against Budanov).

As of now, Budanov is not regarded as a suspect, in accordance with the Russian legislation, the spokesman added.

In 2000, 18 residents of the Chechen republic were illegally deprived of freedom at the checkpoint located near the settlement of Duba-Yurt, Shali District.

“Later, three of them were found killed. A number of local residents believe that Yuri Budanov is involved in this crime,” an SKP official said.

Budanov was released on parole in 2008.

In 2003, Budanov was sentenced to ten years in jail on charges of kidnapping and killing Chechen woman Elza Kungayeva in the village of Tangi-Chu in March 2000.

On January 15, 2009, the Federal Penitentiary Service department for the Ulyanovsk region officially confirmed that Yuri Budanov had left the penitentiary.

After the checkpoint was dismantled in the spring, relatives of the “disappeared” men found the two cars in which they had been traveling. Both cars had been crushed by a tank and buried. The fate of the men remains unknown to the day of this writing.

Neocons means “new conservative”. This is a person who has shown the ability to learn from experience. The only surprising thing is why they were not “conservative” from the beginning. Why would they need to learn something so obvious.

A liberal [left wing person] is a person willing to take a large portion of his or her earnings and pay the cost of a large number of highly paid government employees and their expensive pensions. Government employees are not evil, but they are costly and often do not perform a worthwhile service.

I believe that you liberals should voluntarily pay for all of the government “services” and we conservatives should go our own way and take care of ourselves.

The kremlin now turned his attention to Finland. What he did to the Baltic States, he wished to do to Finland. The kremlin claimed he just wanted strategic areas for defense purposes, but events in the Baltic States left no doubt that the kremlin wanted all of Finland.

The Finnish diplomats summoned to Moscow tried to prolong the discussions as long as possible to allow Finland to prepare for war.

When the bombs fell on Helsinki, one of the first buildings hit was the Soviet Embassy… .

During the Winter War the Finns lost 25,000 people by fighting the Soviet Union. If they had given in to the Soviet demands, like the three other Baltic States, the chances are that they would have had over 400,000 people killed. It seems that they made the right decision, and at the same time saved the N K V D officers a lot of work.

PS Because the kremlin used the sheeple as cannon fodder, the red army had about 10x as many casualties.

It seems you are too drunk to notice that in your corrupted fascist state called RuSSia, whose dictator is a 155 cm. tall bald dwarf Putler, has nightless nights (more time to exercise RuSSian traditions to drink vodka and to rape your women and children in the sunshine).

It seems you are too drunk to notice that in your corrupted fascist state called RuSSia, whose dictator is a 155 cm. tall bald dwarf Putler, has nightless nights (more time to exercise RuSSian traditions to drink vodka and to rape your women and children in the sunshine).

This same description of Monsieur Putain comes from my country, Poland, may I add his latest favorite past time activity: murdering Polish President and his entourage and then robbing the corpses. Vintange Russia, indeed.

ps. Only two countries defeated Russia; Poland in 1920 and Finland in 1940.

LES // June 9, 2010 at 8:04 pmThe kremlin now turned his attention to Finland. The Finnish diplomats summoned to Moscow tried to prolong the discussions as long as possible to allow Finland to prepare for war.

sascha_hero Germany // June 8, 2010 at 2:38 pmWatch this! It´s not a fake,it´s reality for two weeks now! Western media are silent so far. Long live the local rebels in the Far East!!!!

So, let me see… Russia is currently fighting a bloody war with its friend Finland, it is invading Georgia this summer in order to withdraw from it, and there is a bloody civil war in the Far East against a guy called Roma Muromtsev and two of his vodka drinking buddies…. And the mental hospitals are letting patients out for summer vacations… And the Western media are silent so far… Have a good summer, everybody!

Robert // June 7, 2010 at 8:39 pm
“Zaidi acted like a total asshole, yet practically nothing happened to him”

Let me see…. Zaidi is neither a soldier nor a terrorist. He is a simple journalist. He had had a tough life: On November 16, 2007, al-Zaidi was kidnapped by unknown assailants in Baghdad. He was also previously twice arrested by the United States armed forces, just because he was a journalist. And his crime was that he threw a worn shoe at George Bush and missed. And what happened to him?

Al-Zaidi was severely beaten by security officers after he had been dragged out of the room following the shoe-throwing incident. A large blood trail could be seen on the carpet where al-Zaidi had been dragged by security agents. Dawa-owned Afaq TV reported that security forces kicked al-Zaidi and beat him. His family reports that it has received many threatening phone calls. In an interview with BBC News, al-Zaidi’s brother, Durgham al-Zaidi, reported that Muntadhar al-Zaidi suffered a broken hand, broken ribs, internal bleeding, and an eye injury. Durgham al-Zaidi told Al Jazeera that his brother was tortured. Al-Baghdadia TV said that al-Zaidi was “seriously injured” during his detention. Al Sharqiya also points to signs of injury on his thighs and an immobile right arm. On Friday 19 December Dhia al-Kinani, the judge investigating the case, said there were signs al-Zaidi had been beaten; al-Zaidi had bruises on his face and around his eyes. His lawyer, Dhiya’a al-Sa’adi, has also confirmed that al-Zaidi had been beaten, stating that “there are visible signs of torture on his body”.

He was sentenced to three years in prison, and served nine months before he was released for good behaviour.

So, 9 months in prison, beatings and abuse are “nothing” to you, Robert? Next time you complain about some Chechen terrorist getting beaten up or imprisoned in Russia, remember what you said about the beatings and imprisonment of Al-Zaidi: “practically nothing happened to him“

NOTICE: This blog quotes from source material, and links to it. When a post contains quotes and original material, the quotes are in ordinary print and the original in boldface. See "About LR" in the title bar for copyright notice.

Supporting La Russophobe

La Russophobe does not solicit or accept financial support from any source. If you would like to show your support for LR and your opposition to the rise of dictatorship in Russia, the easiest way is to create a Digg or StumbleUpon or Delicious account and use it to favorite some of our posts. LR also welcomes your e-mail comments and submissions for publication, and we urge you to support the effort to boycott of the Sochi Olympics.